Help with GPU passthrough

[marianosk4]

As long as you have a sort of up to date kernel (I think the vfio-pci modules got included from kernel 4.2) the process to isolate the gpu is preety much the same for every distro. What could change is the version of qemu or virt-manager.
There is a guide on this forum that uses debian, it's preety well explained, and it will be easier to apply to the distros you're used to.

As for what VM software, I personally use just qemu with a couple of scripts, but if you want a GUI go with virt-manager.

For the monitor, I only have one with two entries, a DVI and an HDMI, I use the hdmi for the GPU and the DVI for the igpu (I'm using intel so I have integrated graphics, but it would be the same if you use 2 dedicated graphic cards).
As for keyboard and mouse you have 3 possibilities, you either passtrhough both to the VM (as long as they are usb), you buy yourself a KVM switch (which you could also use for the monitor, if yours only have one connector), or you could use synergy.
If you do use synergy, I'd recommend setting up the VM without adding the gpu first, just as a regular VM, install synergy on your guest and make sure that it starts on boot and that it works fine, and then add your GPU to the VM.

You could also use the VM virtual monitor (just as your regular VM) and the GPU at the same time, so you can click on your virtual monitor and the VM gets control of the keyboard and mouse, but some people can't use both the virtual monitor and the GPU at the same time, although I don't know why. I used to do this but now I'm using synergy.

Here's that tutorial I mentioned earlier, you should also read the arch wiki guide, I know you said you don't want to use arch, but most of the process applies to every distro, what could change is the packages you'll need to install, those depend on your distro.

Play games in Windows on Linux! PCI passthrough quick guide

Hello all! I am Gray from GrayWolfTech. I make videos on Linux and other interesting technology. Wendell has given me permission to post my written guides here for my videos. This is great for two reasons: First it helps grow this community and second my videos reach a wider audience to share what I have learned. I look forward to posting all my guides and videos here, and I am more than happy to answer any questions about the guide you may have. -- Onward! -- Now it’s time for one of the coolest and more advanced capabilities of Linux. KVM, or kernel virtual machines. We are going to go through step by step, how to setup PCI pass-through to a Windows virtual machine on a Debian host to play games! Thanks to Redhat, KVM can run virtual machines with almost bare metal performance and supports a wide variety of other neat features. The one we are going to focus on in this video is of course, PCI pass-through. The process of allowing a virtual machine full access to a PCI express graphics card for gaming, CAD, or 3D rendering. With this neat capability, you can run Linux as your host OS, and then pass your GPU (or one of your GPUs if you have multiple) to a virtual machine to play games. Let’s go over the requirements for this project: First and most important, you should backup any data you have on your PC. If you know what you are doing then you will not lose anything, but accidentally selecting the wrong drive when installing can lead you to be very sad when you figure out the drive you wiped had all your really good porn on it. Second, this process will take time. For someone who is an experienced Linux user it should take about 20 minutes (not counting time to install Debian or recompile the kernel). For someone who is new it might take longer. Make sure you allow yourself an entire afternoon or a good chunk of 4-5 hours where you could potentially not have a working PC. Third, follow the instructions I lay out in the video. I will answer questions dow…

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

Also, keep in mind that the process, although not hard, might be difficult to someone with not much experience on linux, so be sure to read and clear your doubts before starting so you don't have any troubles along the way.